The background description provided herein is for the purpose of generally presenting the context of the disclosure. Work of the presently named inventors, to the extent the work is described in this background section, as well as aspects of the description that may not otherwise qualify as prior art at the time of filing, are neither expressly nor impliedly admitted as prior art against the present disclosure.
Neural networks running on conventional computing platforms are widely used for various applications such as “face tagging”, handwriting recognition, breast cancer diagnosis, and the like.
It is well-known that training of neural networks can be computationally very intensive. For example, training an image processing system to recognize handwritten digits 0-9 may take about one week on a 3 GHz Xeon processor. More complicated tasks, such as handwriting recognition for a full alphanumeric character set, speech recognition, and image recognition, take even longer. For example, training a face recognition system can take the equivalent of roughly 10,000 cores running for a week.